* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR JUNE 2012: In breathlessly late-breaking news, on
28 June 2012 the US Supreme Court finally judged on the legality of the
ObamaCare Health Act, more officially the "Affordable Care Act". The court's
decision, which had been anxiously awaiting on both sides of the political
fence, was to approve the legality of the act. It was, to nobody's surprise,
by the narrow vote of 5:4 in favor, though somewhat surprisingly the swing
vote was not Justice Anthony Kennedy, the traditional swing vote in the past
-- Kennedy called ObamaCare "invalid in its entirety" -- but Chief Justice
John Roberts, noted for his solid conservative credentials.

However, it wasn't that surprising, because Roberts has occasionally
demonstrated flexibility in the past. Besides, the "individual mandate", the
requirement of all Americans to obtain health insurance, was not at the
outset of the idea all that unpopular with conservatives, many seeing it as a
sensible alternative to a government-run health program. Indeed, if the US
is to have universal health coverage, it's hard to think of any other
alternative, as discussed
here
in 2011. In the decision, Roberts said:

BEGIN QUOTE:

The Affordable Care Act's requirement that certain individuals pay a
financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be
characterized as a tax. Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is
not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.

END QUOTE

The interesting thing about the decision was that it focused on the ability
of the government to impose penalties for noncompliance of the individual
mandate, not the mandate itself. This is one of these notions that seems
ridiculously obvious in hindsight, since the teeth of the individual mandate
is only in its enforcement -- and the court judged that the government had a
right of enforcement through its rights of taxation. It is of course
indirect reasoning, and ironically it wasn't the main approach the government
used to plead its case, relying instead on the right to control interstate
commerce.

The court rejected that argument, saying the government could regulate
interstate commercial activity, but not interstate commercial inactivity
-- that is, citizens not obtaining a health plan. Some commentators
suggested that the court's rejection of the government's right to control
commerce was a "stealth victory" for conservatives, the precedent likely to
used against the government down the road -- but to no surprise, the court
decision in favor of ObamaCare has been the subject of emotional blog
commentaries all over the map, and it's hard to take any one of them very
seriously. Indeed, Roberts was praised for his wisdom in finding a tidy
compromise position in an era where compromise is unfashionable.

The court did not give the Obama Administration everything, saying that the
government could not withhold Medicaid funding to US states to push
compliance with ObamaCare. While the court's approval of the act is a major
victory for President Barack Obama, not all see it as a defeat for Republican
presidential challenger Mitt Romney, who can now argue that the only way to
sink ObamaCare is to elect him so he can drive a repeal effort. However,
it's easy to think that Obama was the real winner, it being hard to think
the decision will turn any voters away from Obama, and unclear that it will
turn any substantial number of voters to Romney.

* The "Stuxnet" computer worm that
attacked Iran's nuclear development complex was mentioned
here
earlier this year. As reported by BUSINESS WEEK, the Iranians are now
struggling with another virus named "Flame". While Stuxnet was a highly
specialized virus, targeting industrial programmable logic controllers, Flame
is more conventional, targeting PCs. It is, however, unusual in its
sophistication. Typically, malware runs to a megabyte or less in size, but
Flame is 20 megabytes, with an estimated 650,000 lines of code. It can
monitor keystrokes, steal passwords, turn on PC microphones to listen in on
users, and grab screenshots of PC sessions -- to then distribute the stolen
information to a diverse network of servers, making exactly who is using the
data hard to trace. It can even use a Bluetooth wireless link to
communicate.

Investigation suggests Flame may have been in service for the last five
years, going generally unnoticed because it's not intrusive and it appears,
very much unlike other forms of malware, it is selective about which PCs it
infects. Given the sophistication of Flame, there's suspicion a foreign
intelligence service is behind it. The Israelis haven't admitted anything,
but they've made it clear that if they have a chance to hurt Iran, they're
not going to pass it up.

* As reported by THE ECONOMIST, Chinese authorities were not at all happy
with American assistance to Chen Guangcheng, the blind activist who had to
seek refuge in the US embassy against official harassment. In early May,
several Beijing newspapers attacked Chen and US diplomats, labeling Chen a
pawn of Americans trying to discredit China. That much could have been
expected, but the public reaction was a surprise: Chinese microbloggers lit
into the newspapers, with one paper, THE BEIJING TIMES, actually putting up
an apology on its own microblog -- a picture of a bedraggled clown smoking a
cigarette, captioned: "In the deep still of the night, we take off our mask
of insincerity and say to our real selves: we're sorry."

Supportive comments poured in until the censors took the apology off the air.
The papers also lit into the US ambassador to China, Gary Locke, THE BEIJING
DAILY daring him to reveal his assets. Liu Yadong, the editor of a
science-technology daily, pointed out that senior Americans officials have a
habit of making their assets public -- Locke has -- implicitly dangling the
uncomfortable question of why Chinese officials don't. The question is
particularly uncomfortable due to the notoriety of Bo Xilai, a senior Chinese
government official now in the crosshairs of a corruption scandal that is
proving a great embarrassment to the government. Whatever the limitations of
China's Communist Party, its leadership is sensitive to the Party's image,
and appropriately humiliated when the Party's failings become public.

* SCIENCE NOTES: As reported by AAAS SCIENCE INSIDER Online ("Britain's
Biobank Is Open for Business" by Angela Saini, 29 March 2012) Britain,
after a decade's effort, has now opened the "UK Biobank", a repository of
biosamples and health data from a half million Britons. The Biobank was
funded to the tune of 62 million pounds, with the money coming mostly from
the UK Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust.

The Biobank was stocked through a survey conducted from 2006 through 2010 in
which one in every 50 Britons between 40 and 69 years of age was tested.
Blood and urine samples, along with results of physical tests for hearing,
weight, height, bone density, and lung function, as well as personal
interviews, were obtained from each participant. The samples are stored in a
freezer about the size of a house, with two banks on each side of a central
aisle where a robot handler shuttles back and forth to place or retrieve
samples. Biobank access is free for use by anyone performing health-related
research in the public interest anywhere in the world, though the Biobank
does charge handling fees. Users are also required to publish the results of
their studies and enter them into the Biobank's databases.

The idea is that the bank will aid research into ailments such as dementia,
diabetes, and cancer by allowing scientists to draw correlations from a wide
range of factors. Although there were criticisms of the Biobank effort early
on, a meeting in early 2012 was attended by more than 40 groups, including
health charities and pharmaceutical firms, demonstrating the enthusiasm for
the idea. The collection of samples and data for the Biobank is ongoing;
participants will be followed for the rest of their lives, their details
updated from UK National Health Service records, with tests repeated as
judged necessary.

* Malaria has long been one of the toughest threats to public health. As
reported by BBC WORLD Online ("Resistance Spread Compromising Fight Against
Malaria" by Matt McGrath, 5 April 2012), the fight against malaria is getting
harder because the malaria parasite is acquiring resistance to drugs used
to treat the disease.

For many years now the most effective drugs against malaria have been derived
from the Chinese plant named sweet wormwood, or more officially Artemisia
annua. In 2009 researchers found that Plasmodium falciparum, the
nastiest of the malaria parasites that infect humans, was becoming resistant
to the artemisinin drugs in parts of western Cambodia. Now scientists have
found the resistant P. falciparum parasites showing up on the border of
Thailand and Burma. Says one of the researchers: "Spread of drug-resistant
malaria parasites within South East Asia and overspill into sub-Saharan
Africa, where most malaria deaths occur, would be a public health disaster
resulting in millions of deaths."

The scientists cannot tell if the resistance has moved because mosquitoes
carrying the resistant parasites have migrated to the Burmese border, or if
it has arisen spontaneously in the population there. Researchers worry that
the current spread of resistance could be similar to what happened in the
1970s with chloroquine, a drug that was once highly effective, ceased to be
so, with devastating effects. According to the World Malaria Report 2011,
malaria was responsible for killing an estimated 655,000 people in 2010, more
than one every minute, with most of the victims being young children and
pregnant women.

* The genus of fungus known as Cordyceps is a notorious parasite, most
typically attacking insects, particularly ants, or other arthropods, with
some species of the fungus able to manipulate the behavior of their hosts
before devouring them. A recent study shows that a Cordyceps fungus that
infects carpenter ants is itself targeted by a white fungus; when
Cordyceps takes over and kills an ant, the white fungus may infect the
corpse and devour both it and the Cordyceps fungus. "And smaller fleas
have smaller fleas, and so on ad infinitum." Interestingly, by becoming a
parasite of Cordyceps, the white fungus ends up becoming a symbiote of
sorts of the carpenter ants, preventing the spread of Cordyceps to other
ants.

* AEROVIRONMENT AT WAR: As reported by an article from BUSINESS WEEK
("Flight Of The Warbots" by Brad Stone, 12 December 2011), in 1971 engineer
Paul MacCready founded a firm named Aerovironment in the Los Angeles area.
Aerovironment's first claim to fame was the GOSSAMER CONDOR, a human-powered
aircraft that won the Kremer Prize, a $100,000 USD pot for the first
human-powered aircraft that could handle a specified figure-8 course. In
1979 the follow-on GOSSAMER ALBATROSS was the first human-powered aircraft to
cross the English Channel.

Aerovironment became the archetypical "green" firm, working on wind power,
electric vehicles, and solar-powered drones. A funny thing happened to the
company along the way, however: Aerovironment became a defense contractor
and now makes the majority of its sales to the military, providing drones to
help the grunts in the field.

MacReady, who died of cancer in 2007 at age 81, was clearly a "tree hugger",
but he'd never turned up his nose at the defense market. In the late 1980s,
Aerovironment developed a drone named the "Pointer", with a wingspan of about
2.75 meters (9 feet), built of plastics and driven by an electrically-driven
propeller with battery power. The military bought about 50 of them, with
some of them used in the 1991 Gulf War on an operational evaluation basis.
The Pointer seemed to have real potential, but it was a little too big for
infantry use, the lithium batteries didn't have enough capacity, while the
sensors and control systems needed work. It was a promising experiment, but
the military wasn't ready at the moment to charge forward on giving the
ground-pounders their own drones.

And then came 911, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Aerovironment had continued to
tinker with infantry drones and had come with a smaller, better follow-on to
the Pointer, named the "Raven". In 2003, the US Army fielded a few hundred
Raven systems, with three aircraft, two ground stations, and a price tag of
$400,000 USD per system. The troops loved the Raven; it allowed infantry to
look around corners to spot traps, and direct mortar fire on adversaries
lurking in ambush -- the fact that the Raven was the neatest toy a bored
soldier could have to play with couldn't have hurt, either. Business boomed.
By 2007, Aerovironment couldn't build enough of the improved "Raven-B" drones
fast enough, with the Raven putting in 150,000 flight hours a year. The
company also offered a Pointer follow-on, the Puma, which was obtained by the
Special Operations Command. While Aerovironment has plenty of competition in
the infantry drone market, it still dominates, with 85% of the company's
revenue from drone sales.

The Raven was only part of Aerovironment's drone development efforts. About
a decade ago the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
sponsored an experimental program to develop drones about the size of
songbirds. The DARPA effort didn't produce an operational system, since at
the time it proved impossible to make a drone that small that had reasonable
endurance and could carry a useful payload. However, the exercise did result
in the develop of electrically powered drones that weren't quite that small,
Aerovironment developing the "Wasp", which has been fielded by the US Marines
and Air Force in limited numbers. Aerovironment hasn't given up on
ultra-tiny drones either; they're becoming more practical as technology
improves, with the company demonstrating a "Nano Hummingbird" drone that
maneuvers around with all the agility of a hummingbird.

In the meantime, Aerovironment has worked on big drones as well, developing
the "Global Observer" drone, in the form of a giant powered sailplane that
can fly for up to a week at high altitude, burning liquid hydrogen. The
Global Observer program is on hold for the moment, but Aerovironment does see
big promise in a new small drone, the "Switchblade". Like the Raven, it is
driven by propeller using battery power; it differs in being tube-launched,
with pop-out wings fore and aft, hence the name. The tube could be carried
on a helicopter, or it can be set up like a mortar to be used by infantry.
It also differs from the Raven in that it carries a warhead, amounting to a
"mini cruise missile" that the ground-pounders can use to locate the Black
Hats and take them out.

Switchblade is the first actual weapon built by Aerovironment. There was
some uneasiness at the firm over building a killing machine, but it wasn't
that big of a jump -- what's the real ethical distinction in building a
surveillance platform to provide targeting for other weapons and building the
weapon itself? Winning the battle means saving the lives of our own troops,
and winning necessarily means taking out adversaries more effectively. When
Aerovironment went to war, it had already accepted that reality, and building
a true weapon was simply facing up to its ugly implications.

* CHINESE NAME GAMES: As reported by an article from AAAS SCIENCE NOW
("Mapping China's Ancient Name Game" by Erin Loury, 27 April 2012), familial
histories can be traced by identifying common family names or "surnames", and
to extent family names can trace population connections and movements across
and between countries. A region with high surname similarity indicates that
a stable population has lived in an area for a long time, while a region of
low surname similarity suggests the migration of different groups of people
into the area.

A recent study along such lines considered the surname patterns of 1.28
billion Chinese. Although researchers have studied surname structures for
other countries, China's family names possess some unique features that make
them very convenient for investigation. The country's recorded history of
surnames stretches back 4,000 years, and Confucian traditions dictated that
surnames were consistently passed through the paternal line without
hyphenation or other changes.

Furthermore, the total number of family names in China is very small. The
1.28 billion people included in the study shared a mere 7,327 surnames --
compared with nearly 900,000 last names documented in a study of 18 million
people in the United States. Part of the reason is because Chinese surnames
traditionally are based on a single ideographic character, which tends to
limit the tendency of names to mutate over time. However, even considering
that, the range of Chinese surnames is extremely narrow, with about 85% of
the population sharing the 100 most common surnames, and one-fifth of Chinese
having the surnames Wang (which can be rendered as Wong), Li (Lee), or Zhang
(Chang).

Researchers at Beijing Normal University in China who were investigating
relationships within complex networks, wanted to determine if they could spot
patterns among the surnames of a sample of 1.28 billion Chinese listed by
China's National Citizen Identity Information Center, examining the
distribution of names on scales ranging from provinces down to counties.

The researchers found that regions with a high prevalence of shared surnames
also contained large populations of ethnic minorities. These regions, in far
western and southern China, were ethnically dissimilar from the rest of the
country. The researchers believed that reflected the fact that ethnic
minorities often have unique surnames and tend to marry within their groups.
However, the researchers also found that counties along either side of the
lower Yangtze River exhibit very low surname similarity, suggesting
large-scale migrations.

Diana Lary, a historian at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver,
cautions that surname patterns are a simplified way of looking at stories of
migration. In addition, just like all the Smiths in the United States are
not related to each other, shared surnames in China do not necessarily
reflect common ancestry. However, the researchers say Chinese surnames still
tend to follow familial genetic patterns, and as a next step they plan to
investigate whether the country's mosaic of surnames matches up with genetic
diversity.

ED: I found this article interesting because when I was working as factory
contact, I got to wondering about the apparently limited numbers of surnames
among my contacts from China. I asked a Taiwanese guy I worked with: "Sam,
I notice that Chinese seem to have fairly common last names -- Chen, Wong,
Lee, and so on. Are these actually different names that end up sounding the
same in English phonetics?"

I figured that with tonal dialects like Mandarin, a lot might be lost in
translation. Sam shook his head: "No. You know all those guys you deal
with from Singapore named Tan?" Sure did, it seemed there were few of them
in Singapore who weren't named Tan. "Same last name as Chen. Same
symbol." Oh, it's worse than it sounds, huh?

And then there's Koreans. I keep wondering just how much of the Korean
population is named Kim, Lee, Park, Sun, and Moon. I would guess at least
half, and possibly well more than that. I guess that limited name diversity
would be expected in a country with a tradition as a "Hermit Kingdom".

* RETHINK THE SYSTEM (4): Having created the new AirVectors website on
FatCow, that left the issue of what to do with the remaining Vectors website.
I waffled on whether to drop my account with my old vendor, Webmasters, and
find a new vendor for the Vectors website. My communications with Webmasters
were poor -- no live chat, I would try to phone them and after a brief wait
they'd inevitably put me into voicemail, suggesting they were really strapped
for support resources -- but a regular hosting account there cost about the
same as it would be for anyone else, and their service was generally
reliable.

So I asked if they could down-convert my server account to a normal hosting
account. They said, in effect, do it yourself: buy a hosting account and
then shut down the server account. I wasn't offended; it was just a
nonstarter. Basically I was being told to start over, and if that was the
case, it was all the same if I went someplace else. I promptly got a new
hosting account on JustHost -- I wanted to try a different vendor from FatCow
for the experience -- and found getting on board as straightforward as I had
with Fatcow. I suspect these mass-market hosting services need to be run in
a competitive and well-organized fashion.

Well, straightforward except for retargeting my domain names. If I had ever
done that before, I'd forgotten all about it, and I was baffled at first --
but it was simple, I could just track down the domain name provider for
"www.vectorsite.net" with WHOIS, then log in and change the host the domain
name was pointing to. Nothing to it, but I don't want to forget that again.
In fact, it would be nice to consolidate both my domain names under a single
provider, if I can find one with a decent reputation, there being some
scammers out there.

OK, Vectors was on JustHost, now I had to shut down the Webmasters account.
Communications on doing that were as poor as before: Webmasters support told
me to go into my primary control panel and just do a DELETE. I did so -- but
though I couldn't get into the account again after that, I got no
acknowledgement that I wasn't still going to be billed again. Considering
how effective Webmasters had seemed up to that point, I was not at all
comfortable with just leaving it at that. It took me about a total of an
hour's calling around to find someone who could tell me that I didn't really
have an account with Webmasters any longer -- and I still wasn't sure they
wouldn't bill me again. They still are hosting my domain name, that being
one of the reasons I'd like to consolidate my domain names elsewhere.

* Having got everything more or less in place on my two new websites, I was
finding management of a proliferation of passwords very troublesome. I had
to write them down lest I forget them -- I'm at the age where I don't
assume I can remember things -- but I didn't want anyone who stole or raided
my PC to get at them. I'd come up a scheme for writing down passwords in a
way that would make them hard to find on my PC, but it was clumsy for me to
use and really not all that secure.

I decided that the best thing to do was to put all the passwords in a
password-protected encrypted file. I figured I could write my own little
encryption program -- nothing very sophisticated, still enough to stymie
anyone but the pros. However, although I did map out how the program would
work in my head, when I sat down to implement it in C, I then realized that
C's trickiness in handling data types was likely to make it more complicated
than I thought. It would have been simple in Python, but having got heavily
sidetracked in getting my knowledge of HTML up to date, I was still too low
on the Python learning curve.

I decided to look around online for freeware encryption programs. After
fiddling around for a time, I finally decided just to use the popular Pretty
Good Privacy (PGP) package, or more specifically the GnuPG variant. I was a
little leery of it because GNU is run by hardcore software geeks who tend to
have poor communications skills, and getting GNU stuff to work can be a pain.
However, I downloaded GPG and, though the user friendliness did indeed leave
something to be desired, I managed to get it to work with only a few false
starts.

I wrote a batch file that would open up an encrypted passwords file using
GPG, prompting me for the key to do so, and bring it up in Windows Notepad.
Once saved, the file would be encrypted again. That would leave a text
version behind, but the batch file overwrote the contents of that text file
and then deleted it. I suppose somebody might be able to find something in
disk sectors, but I'm also sure that wouldn't be trivial. I put a shortcut
to the batch script on my desktop, and it got to be sort of a game for a
while, tweaking passwords until I figured out those I was comfortable with.
[TO BE CONTINUED]

* AIRLINER FACELIFT (5): As a bit of a tangent from the topic of keeping
airliners up to date, an article from AVIATION WEEK ("Towering Testbed" by
Guy Norris, 7 May 2012) described what kind of work a jetliner can end up
doing after it's been put out to pasture from customer service.

Jetliners have long been used as engine testbeds; a four-jet aircraft with
engines on underwing pylons is fairly convenient for that purpose, allowing
relatively easy fit of the test engine on an underwing pylon and leaving
three engines to get airborne. In 1999, engine-maker Pratt & Whitney (P&W)
acquired a Boeing 747SP airliner -- the "short" version of the classic 747
jumbo jet -- for that purpose, recycling a 1976-vintage machine that had
served with Air China.

Now P&W has acquired a second 747SP, a 1980-vintage aircraft that had served
with Korean Air. It was gathering dust in the deserts of the US Southwest
when P&W obtained it for new work, with L3 Communications of Waco, Texas,
performing the modifications to turn the airliner into an engine testbed.
L3 was already familiar with the 747SP, having performed extensive
modifications of one to convert it into the NASA-DLR SOFIA flying
observatory, discussed
here
in 2010.

While it might not seem obvious that turning a jetliner into an engine
testbed would take a lot of modification, it becomes more obvious on
inspection of a photo of the testbed -- since the engine is carried not on an
underwing pylon, but on a stub wing sticking out to the right and fitted high
on the 747, behind the cockpit. This is not a new idea; Honeywell flies a
Boeing 757 twinjet airliner with a similar configuration to test small
engines. The advantage over mounting engines on a wing pylon is flexibility,
since almost any engine can be mounted on the stub wing, including propfans
and turboprops.

It wasn't just a question of bolting a wing onto the 747SP, since the
aircraft had never been designed to be configured in such a way. L3 added a
reinforcement hoop around the airframe cross-section where the stub pylon was
fitted, with the company also hooking up fuel and hydraulic lines, plus
control and status wiring, through the upper fuselage. Another addition was
an engine fire extinguisher system, a particularly good thing to have when
testing prototype engines. All such support systems were implemented to be
as independent of normal aircraft systems as possible. A range of different
stub wings and associated engine pylons can be attached for testing different
engines. The wing is designed not to generate lift, and it was
positioned to reduce the effect of test engine exhaust on the aircraft's
tailplane.

The 747SP is relatively expensive to fly and P&W intends to use smaller
aircraft for small engines, while reserving the original 747SP testbed for
the biggest engines; the new testbed is targeted at the range in between.
The 747SP's relatively long flight endurance does allow a testing program to
cut the number of test flights by up to half, and the aircraft being mostly
unladen, aircrews can fly on two engines in cruise flight to reduce fuel
costs. Both of the company's 747SP testbeds operate out of a facility at
Montreal's Mirabel airport. The initial flight test program is focused on
the PW1217G geared turbofan, to be used on the new Mitsubishi Regional Jet.
[TO BE CONTINUED]

-- 04 MAY 12 / AEHF 2 -- An Atlas 5 booster was launched from Cape
Canaveral in Florida to put the second "Advanced Extremely High Frequency
(AEHF)" military geostationary comsat into orbit. It featured encrypted /
low probability of intercept communications along with jam resistance and
resistance to electromagnetic pulse. The spacecraft had a launch mass of
6,150 kilograms (13,565 pounds) and was based on the Lockheed Martin A2100
comsat bus. AEHF is planned to eventually replace the long-standing Milstar
military comsat network, with one AEHF having more bandwidth than all five
current Milstar spacecraft put together. The Atlas 5 booster was in the
"531" configuration, with a 5 meter (16 foot 5 inch) fairing, three solid
rocket boosters, and an upper stage with a single Centaur engine.

-- 06 MAY 12 / TIANHUI 1B -- A Long March 2D booster was launched from
Jiuquan in China to put the "Tianhui 1B" Earth remote sensing satellite into
orbit. It was the second in the series, the first having been launched in
August 2010.

-- 10 MAY 12 / YAOGAN 14, TIANTUO 1 -- A Long March 4B booster was
launched from Taiyuan in China to put the "Yaogan 14" spacecraft into orbit;
it was believed to be an optical film-return reconnaissance satellite. The
launch also included the "Tiantuo 1" smallsat, which had a launch mass of 9
kilograms (20 pounds); it carried a set of experiments and an
Automatic Identification System (AIS)
relay payload for tracking ships at sea.

-- 14 MAY 12 / SOYUZ ISS 30S (ISS) -- A Russian Soyuz booster was launched
from Baikonur in Kazakhstan to put the "Soyuz ISS 30S" AKA "TMA-04" manned
space capsule into orbit on an International Space Station (ISS) support
mission. The crew included commander Gennady Padalka (fourth space flight),
flight engineer Sergey Revin (first space flight) -- both of the Russian
space agency RKA -- and astronaut Joseph Acaba (first space flight) of NASA.
They docked with the ISS's upper Poisk module two days later, joining the
"Expedition 31" crew of commander Oleg Kononenko of the RKA, flight engineer
Donald Petit of NASA, and astronaut Andre Kuipers of the ESA. The new
arrivals seeded the ISS "Expedition 32" crew.

-- 15 MAY 12 / JCSAT 13, VINASAT 2 -- An Ariane 5 ECA booster was launched
from Kourou in French Guiana to put the Japanese "JCSAT 13" and Vietnamese
"VinaSat 2" geostationary comsats into orbit. JCSAT 13 was built by Lockheed
Martin for SKY Perfect JSAT Corporation of Japan, and was based on the
company's A2100 comsat bus. It had a launch mass of 4,527 kilograms (9,983
pounds), carried a payload of 44 Ku-band transponders, and had a design life
of 15 years. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 124 degrees east
longitude to provide communications services to Japan and Southeast Asia. It
replaced the JCSAT 4A comsat, which was launched in 1999.

VinaSat 2 was also a Lockheed Martin A2100-type comsat, with a launch mass of
2,968 kilograms (6,546 pounds), a payload of 24 Ku-band transponders, and a
design life of 15 years. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 131.8
degrees east longitude to provide communications services to Vietnam and
neighboring countries.

-- 17 MAY 12 / COSMOS 2480 (KOBALT M) -- A Russian Soyuz-U booster was
launched from Plesetsk Northern Cosmodrome to put a "Kobalt M / Yantar 4K2M"
class optical reconnaissance satellite into orbit. The spacecraft was
designated "Cosmos 2480". This was the last launch of a Soyuz-U, the booster
being replaced by the Soyuz-2 and Angara-A3 boosters.

-- 17 MAY 12 / NIMIQ 6 -- A Proton M Breeze M booster was launched from
Baikonur to put the Canada Telesat "Nimiq 6" geostationary comsat into orbit.
The spacecraft was built by Space Systems / Loral; it had a launch mass of
4,490 kilograms (9,900 pounds), a payload of 32 Ku-band transponders, and a
design life of 15 years. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 91.1
degrees west longitude.

-- 17 MAY 12 / GCOM W1 & KOMPSAT 3 -- A Japanese H-2A booster was launched
from the JAXA launch center at Tanegashima to put the Japanese "Global Change
Observation Mission (GCOM) W1" AKA "Shizuka (Droplet / Dew)" and South Korean
"Kompsat 3" satellites into orbit. GCOM W1 was dedicated to tracking global
precipitation and the water cycle; it had a launch mass of 1,990 kilograms
(4,389 pounds). Kompsat 3 was an Earth observation satellite, with an
imaging system featuring a best resolution of 70 centimeters (28 inches).
The launch also included two smallsats:

The JAXA "SDS 4" small demonstration satellite, with a launch mass of 50
kilograms (110 pounds) and experimental payloads including an AIS relay
for ship tracking.

The "Horyu 2" student-built craft from the Kyushu Institute of Technology.

-- 22 MAY 12 / DRAGON C2+ -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from
Cape Canaveral on the second Falcon 9 flight. It carried the second "all-up"
SpaceX Dragon supply capsule, designated "Dragon C2+". It carried 500
kilograms (1,100 pounds) of payload. The Dragon capsule docked with the ISS
Harmony module on 25 May and returned to Earth on 31 May, completing a highly
successful test flight. The Falcon 9 payload also included two small Orbcomm
comsats.

-- 27 MAY 12 / CHINASAT 1B -- A Long March 3B booster was launched from
Xichang in China to put the "Chinasat 1B" military geostationary comsat into
orbit. The booster was in the 3B/E configuration, with an uprated first
stage and liquid-fuel boosters.

-- 29 MAY 12 / YAOGAN 15 -- A Long March 4B booster was launched from
Taiyuan to put the "Yaogan 15" into orbit; it was believed to be an optical
film-return reconnaissance satellite.

* OTHER SPACE NEWS: The European Space Agency (ESA) has now selected the
agency's next large-scale space science mission, the "Jupiter Icy Moons
Explorer (JUICE)" to investigate the Galilean moons Europa, Ganymede, and
Callisto. JUICE is scheduled to be launched in 2022 and will make detailed
observations of Jupiter and its moons for at least three years following its
arrival at the solar system's largest planet in 2030. After visiting
Callisto and measuring the thickness of the icy crust of Europa, plans call
for JUICE to enter into orbit around Ganymede in 2032, studying the moon's
icy surface and subsurface ocean. It will also observe the interaction of
Ganymede's magnetic field and the Jovian magnetosphere. ESA is expected to
issue a second call for large missions in 2013; the first competition began
in 2007.

* THE BANANA BUSINESS: It's always interesting to learn how ordinary
things get done. The website "Edible Geography", which it seems scours the
world for interesting stories about food, zeroed in on the banana.
The banana farming business was discussed
here
in 2005; the "Edible Geography" article,"Spaces Of Banana Control" from 29
November 2011, focused instead on the distribution end.

Welcome to Paul Rosenblatt's "Banana Distributors of New York (BDNY)", which
ships a million boxes of bananas a year from its locale on Drake Street in
the Bronx. As everyone knows, bananas are touchy, easily bruised and, more
significantly, quick to go overripe, which makes them a bit tricky to handle.
It's so tricky that there are only about four distributors in the New York
metropolitan area.

Due to the rapid ripening, bananas have to be harvested when they're still
thoroughly green and hard. After the bunches are cut, they are washed in
cool water, and then put in a refrigerated container for transport. They're
not frozen of course, just kept cool at about 13 degrees Celsius (56 degrees
Fahrenheit). The bunches of green bananas amount to "raw material" to be
processed by distributors such as BDNY, using a carefully-designed system of
pressurized, temperature- and atmosphere-controlled rooms to fool the banana
into thinking it's still back on the plant in tropical Ecuador.

Typically, BDNY will ripen fruit in five days at 17 degrees Celsius (62
degrees Fahrenheit), but the ripening can be accelerated to four days by
raising the temperature a bit, or slowed to seven days by lowering the
temperature. Keeping the bananas cool is not as simple as it sounds.
According to Rosenblatt: "The energy coming off a box of ripening bananas
could heat a small apartment." BDNY has experimented with using the heat
from ripening bananas to help reduce facility heating costs.

Different customers may request different degrees of ripeness, from "1"
(green and hard) to "7" (yellow and spotted), with BDNY proudly advertising:
"Every Color, Every Day!" It's a troublesome logistical problem; to be able
to provide "every color every day" demands a minimum of five ripening rooms.
BDNY has 22, with each room able to handle 1,000 to 2,000 boxes of bananas.
That means shipping thousands of boxes of bananas a week or rooms end up
idle, becoming a business overhead that isn't making money. Rosenblatt says
there were a fair number of small banana distributors in the NYC area up to
the 1970s, but they couldn't compete with the more efficient big operators.

The most popular shades are between 2.5 and 3.5. BDNY serves the Fairway
grocery chain, which will have bunches of bananas on the shelf for a few days
and accordingly wants them greener than a small deli that turns them over
quickly. Rosenblatt says that street vendors, as well as shops generally
serving Latin American customers, like them full yellow.

Ripening is not just a function of room temperature; the bananas also have to
be gassed with ethylene to accelerate their ripening -- incidentally,
ethylene is one of the world's most heavily produced organic compounds. Back
in the day, ethylene would be simply dispensed from a gas cylinder, but that
gave uneven results; it also increased the fire hazard, ethylene being highly
flammable, and in fact in the old days people could get killed in
ripening-room explosions. Nowdays, the ethylene is dispersed in a carefully
controlled flow with "Easy-Ripe" generator systems. Go into a ripening room
that's just been gassed can be a stomach-churning experience, the visitor
overpowered by a smell of too-ripe fruit.

BDNY still operates rooms that were set up in the 1970s, along with more
modern installations. The new rooms are designed with palletized loads in
mind, while the old rooms were built to deal with boxes of bananas. In the
old days they just piled the boxes in, but these days they're carefully
stacked to ensure proper ventilation, with a fan system ensuring even and
efficient air circulation. The more modern rooms are structured to ensure
proper layout, and have two tiers that can be serviced by fork lift, to be
quickly loaded up or unloaded. The latest rooms have three tiers.

Shipping containers have been developed that will do the ripening on their
own, but Rosenblatt doesn't feel threatened because he deals in volumes that
couldn't be reasonably handled with such an approach. Rosenblatt does have a
tough job in certain respects; it's not like he can close up shop on the
weekends, the bananas have to be tended continuously, and BDNY is in
operation from 10 PM to noon all year round. However, it's not too hazardous
a job: Rosenblatt says that in four decades in the banana trade, he has
never seen a snake, and has only come across one spider, which he gave to the
Bronx Zoo.

* POP-UP MICROFAB: An article run
here
in 2010 discussed the efforts of Gu-Yeon Wei and Rob Wood, two electrical
engineers at Harvard University, to develop robot bees. This exercise was
further discussed as part of an article in BUSINESS WEEK ("Secrets Of The
Fold" by Drake Bennett, 7 May 2012) on fabrication of gadgets and
microsystems using "DNA origami" and "machine origami", discussed
here
and
here
recently. Wood and his grad students had been painstakingly assembling the
robobees with microscopes, tweezers, and superglue. The process was not only
extremely laborious, it also had painfully low production yields. There had
to be a better way.

Wood and some of his students got to talking and found an inspiration:
pop-up children's books. Wood says: "You open up the page, and out pops
this complicated structure. All of the assembly trajectories are built into
that laminated two-dimensional structure."

Even the pop-up assemblies in children's books can be dicey to figure out,
and obviously building a robobee with such an approach was going be tricky.
However, the advantages were obvious, since in potential it meant that
robobees or other small, elaborate machines could be stamped out in bulk at
low cost. Two of Wood's students, Pratheev Sreetharan and J. Peter Whitney,
focused on the task, reading books on how to design paper pop-ups and trading
emails with a German pop-up sculptor. Sreetharan, a physicist by trade,
became obsessed with the challenge of figuring out the arrangement of a
two-dimensional laminate with just the right cuts to allow it to smoothly
unfold into a three-dimensional structure with collisions or binding. He
performed computer design analyses and assembled models of subassemblies
using cardboard.

The robobee laminate that emerged had 18 layers, consisting of layers of
carbon fiber for the body; titanium for the wing frames; piezoelectric
ceramic to flap the wings; and a flexible polymide plastic film for the
joints. The layers were stacked on top of each other, using dowels for
alignment; each layer had about 3,000 laser cuts, with the layers selectively
bonded at the appropriate points with a solid adhesive. Some of the
robobee's structural elements, such as the wings, were only fabricated using
one layer, while others were built up from the interactions of multiple
layers -- for example, the joints were polymide sandwiched between layers of
carbon fiber, with small gaps cut from the carbon to permit articulation.
The electronics needed for sensing and flight control could be printed onto
some of the layers using standard circuit-board assembly processes.

Sreetharan also came up with a notion of using sacrificial elements to
support the assembly until it was complete, to then be cut away by laser.
Last spring he was ready to run his first test, and much to his surprise it
worked almost perfectly. His latest robobees snap into place in a tenth of a
second. He finds a Zen satisfaction in it: "[The robobee assembly] has so
many parts that are basically in harmony. Nothing in it is still.
Everything happens together in such an ordered and controlled way."

Wood and others involved in the research on pop-up fabrication see its
application as ranging far beyond the assembly of robobees, with broad
applicability for manufacturing many different sorts of objects. Hong
Kong-based toy maker WowWee is very interested in the pop-up research,
working on prototypes of elaborate toys with sophisticated electronics
fabricated using pop-up technology. Says a company official: "Toys are
typically very labor-intensive; we can save costs and make products more
efficiently this way. We're also looking at making products smaller and
more compact than we could otherwise."

* RETHINK THE SYSTEM (3): I had hunted around for an ad service provider
and found recommendations for Adbrite as an alternative to Google Adsense.
I tracked down their web site and signed up, obtaining code for banner
ads. I was soon bringing in money, if only a trickle.

Having two websites, I decided to try a different ad service provider and
found BidVertiser. However, BidVertiser didn't work out. I have no problems
with top banner ads, in fact I don't think a web page looks right without
one; however, I don't like intrusive ads. AdBrite provides options for
intrusive ads, but doesn't particularly push them; BidVertiser does, in fact
even claiming that ads that roll up from the bottom of the screen over the
page are "not intrusive". Worse, BidVertiser didn't even return a trickle of
money.

I dropped BidVertiser and ran AdBrite on both sites. Adbrite is still not
paying off well, I'd be lucky to make ten bucks a month off of it, but
long-term Adbrite users counsel patience. [ED: It would ultimately prove
useless, helping me to realize that internet advertising is bogus.]

* In any case, having moved all the AirVectors files from the old site, I had
to put forwarding links there to point readers to the new site. It was
trivial to do, I just wrote a batch script that copied and altered a template
HTML file to a list of html file names to be moved, with the new files
displaying a large banner saying: "Files have moved, change your links,
click here to go to the file you're after."

Nothing to it -- except that I realized after a while the scheme might have
problems with hotlink protection. I don't like people hotlinking images off
my websites, not just because of the drain on my bandwidth, but also because
people on forums tend to indiscriminately hotlink from websites all over the
world; they then move on and forget about them, leaving the hotlinks a
nuisance for years. As a result, one of the first things I do when I move to
a new web host is turn on hotlink protection.

The difficulty is that the effects of hotlink protection are not all that
predictable, and I didn't know if the hotlink protection would block the
banner telling users a file had moved. I thought it over for a bit and then
realized that while I normally use PNG and JPG files, I never use GIF files;
so I converted the banner to GIF files and dropped hotlink protection for GIF
files.

The hotlink protection allows me to substitute another image for that being
hotlinked. Initially, I substituted a little avatar of Wile E. Coyote -- but
then I saw somebody online say they substituted an ad for their website
instead. I felt dense, I should have thought of that; such a Zen solution,
people try to nick me, they end up promoting my site instead. I cooked up
small-sized banner ads for my websites, put them in GIF format, and set up
the hotlink protection to substitute them instead. They're very lightweight
files, being only a few kilobytes in size, both even smaller than the Coyote
avatar. Setting them up with a clickable link seemed problematic, but no
worries, I just wrote the appropriate URL in loud colors on each banner ad.
I really like tinkering with banner ads.

* Incidentally, I am fond of using the Leechblock add-on for Firefox to block
access to annoying websites. Leechblock can display a custom image on an
attempt to access a blocked site; I had been using an image in my photo
archives, but that went away when I moved the photo archives to Flickr. No
problem, I just modified the "file has been moved" banner to warn me I was
trying to access a website I'd recognized as a loser already, and I didn't
need to step in it twice.

Along these same lines, I recently discovered that the Amazon.com product
comments system has a "killfile" mechanism, more specifically "ignore this
customer". I continue to slip up on occasion and post online, but now when
the trolls come out of the woodwork to respond I just hit them with "ignore".
It's sort of like playing whack-a-mole. Indeed, I've taken to liberally
using it while going through customer reviews, even when I'm not posting,
which over the long run ensures I have less incentive to post thanks to
elimination of provocations.

I really wish killfile mechanisms were more common on the internet; indeed,
it is amusing to consider a future time when I could "kill" trolls no matter
where I went on the internet. That might well fall out of a "universal" ID
scheme, with browsers smart enough to block out content from a list of
undesireables. Once a universal ID scheme was in service, it would become
self-reinforcing; although people would still be free to create sock puppets,
a browser could be programmed to ignore anyone with an untraceable ID. The
scammers will figure out ways around it, but they'll have to do some work.

The trolls scream: "Censorship! Censorship!" -- when they get shut out.
Not at all; the show will go on, but I'm not going to stay and watch. All
they want to do is scream anyway, I take it for what it's worth, and consider
the day when universal killfiles make posting outside of their forums an
exercise in futility, or at least more obvious futility. The internet has
been a gold mine for cranks, but their days of being able to rant at the
world may be numbered. [TO BE CONTINUED]

* AIRLINER FACELIFT (4): Having discussed frontiers in airline hardware
amenities for passengers, an article from THE NEW YORK TIMES ("Beyond
Mile-High Grub: Can Airline Food Be Tasty?" by Jan Mouawad, 10 March 2012)
focused on the efforts of airlines to keep passengers better fed.

Airliner food has a notoriously bad reputation, but it isn't -- entirely --
the fault of the airlines. A big problem is that an airliner does a good job
of dulling the sense of taste, thanks to low air pressure and humidity.
That's why airlines tend to push tomato juice and spice up foods heavily;
anything lacking a strong taste becomes tasteless. A good light wine will
taste like lemon juice.

And then there's the issue of the necessary reliance on prepackaged meals.
According to Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public
health at New York University: "Ice cream is about the only thing I can
think of that tastes good on a plane. Airlines have a problem with food on
board. The packaging, freezing, drying and storage are hard on flavor at any
altitude, let alone 30,000 feet."

Anybody who flies coach might wonder why it's an issue, since free meals for
cattle class died out from the late 1980s, a victim of ruthless cost
competition -- yes, they really did serve free meals to coach at one time,
though these days one would be lucky to get a box lunch. However, airlines
are now seeing cuisine as a way of competing for business and first-class
passengers, and are correspondingly pumping more money into food.

It's been a uphill struggle, a food services manager for the German airline
Lufthansa commenting: "We put a lot of effort in designing perfect meals for
our clients, but when we tried them ourselves in the air, the meals would
taste like airline food. We were puzzled." It seems that airlines had never
done any serious research on the subject up until recently; Lufthansa
contracted with the Fraunhofer Institute of Building Physics to figure out
what was going on, to learn answers to such questions as to why airliner
passengers were so fond of tomato juice.

On top of the issues of taste buds, airline food service is a logistical
nightmare. The airline catering industry, which is worth $13 billion USD a
year, serves millions of meals daily worldwide. It must maintain supply
chains, standards and quality for a diversity of local conditions. Preparing
food is one thing; juggling huge numbers of meals to make sure they're
prepared in time for specific flights and placed on board the proper aircraft
-- all day, every -- is a massive headache. In 2010, LSG Sky Chefs, the
biggest flight caterer, produced 460 million meals for 300 airlines in 200
flight kitchens in 50 countries. GateGourmet, the number-two caterer, served
9,700 daily flights in 28 countries.

Catering facilities are part restaurants, part industrial production
facilities where thousands of workers turn out meals. Food safety standards
require all meals to be cooked first on the ground; they are then
blast-chilled and refrigerated until they can be stacked on carts and loaded
on planes. The meals are almost ready to go when loaded, since only an
absurdly posh VIP jet will have anything resembling a real kitchen. Galley
space is tight, and for safety open-flame grills and ovens aren't allowed on
commercial aircraft. Flight attendants are not in any position to do food
preparation; all they can do is reheat and serve the food. The heating is
usually performed by convection ovens that blow dry, hot air over the food --
which tends to dry out the food, and so lately there's been a push towards
steam ovens.

To meet the taste challenge, airlines have been contracting with celebrity
chefs and have been coming up with very spiffy menus. Singapore Airlines,
has published a book of in-flight recipes from 10 chefs. Its business- and
first-class passengers can pick their meals from an online menu 24 hours
before takeoff. The airline offers a braised soy-flavored duck with yam rice
-- a specialty from Singapore -- or a seafood thermidor with buttered
asparagus, slow-roasted vine-ripened tomatoes and saffron rice. Korean Air
actually owns its own farm, with more than 1,600 head of cattle and more than
5,000 chickens destined for meals in first class.

American carriers were something of laggards in the food business, initially
only offering nice meals on international flights, but they have been
gradually uprating their meal service on transcontinental flights, again
being driven by competition for business and first-class passengers.
They've been carefully crafting meals and snacks to keep premium passengers
happy. United Airlines even offers ice cream sundaes with a choice of six
toppings on international flights, though domestic flights only get warm
cookies. Fly the friendly skies. [TO BE CONTINUED]

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: There's been something of a buzz in the tech
blogosphere over the new "Leap" gesture recognition device by Leap Motion,
to be introduced late this year. It's a USB device that sits in front of a
display to observe hand and finger movements. Demo videos and pre-release
evaluations show the Leap to be a very capable piece of hardware, for only
about $70 USD. At that price, I'll have to buy one; even if it doesn't turn
out to be useful, it should be a lot of fun to play with. I suspect that
if it's a big hit, we should be seeing gesture recognition built into
notebooks and PC displays before too long. [ED: As of 2016, it hasn't
happened.]

* As reported by BUSINESS WEEK, athletic shoe maker Nike has come up with a
innovative new product, to be introduced this summer, called the "Flyknit",
which is fabric from a weave of synthetic threads. The woven construction
makes the shoe very comfortable to slip on, and it's light as well, only
about 55% the weight of a conventional Nike shoe.

The Flyknit has another important quality as well, though one more visible to
a manufacturer than a consumer: it's easy to build. A conventional athletic
shoe has about three dozen pieces and has to be sewn together, making its
manufacture labor-intensive. The Flyknit, in contrast only has two pieces, a
sole and the woven top section, fabricated automatically under computer
control. That means producing such a shoe is potentially cheap, allowing
Nike to move production back to the USA from the Far East.

Consumers won't see the low production cost reflected in the sticker price
soon, since Nike knows the Flyknit will be worth a premium on its own merits.
However, such a radically new and more efficient production process is likely
to bring costs down considerably, at least once the technology or its
equivalent is obtained by competitors. It also opens the possibility of
customers being able to buy shoes perfectly fitted to foot measurements.

* In personal gimmick news, I came into some money and decided to replace my
old Maytag refrigerator. It was working fine, but it was over 20 years old
and clearly beyond its design life. I liked the idea of getting a new, much
more energy-efficient refrigerator; I didn't think I would come close to
saving enough on electricity bills to pay off the cost of the new
refrigerator, but since I couldn't bet the old refrigerator was likely to
stay working too much longer, I decided to take the leap and bought a
Whirlpool top-freezer unit.

The old Maytag was white, the new Whirlpool is black, and I didn't quite
appreciate just how much bigger the new refrigerator was than the old -- it
gives something of the impression of a 2001 SPACE ODYSSEY monolith in my
kitchen. I'll get used to that; I really like my new toy. There's nothing
fancy about it, it's just a plain-vanilla refrigerator, with no ice-maker or
other gimmicks, but it does have some nice features. One is that all the
drawers and shelving are clear plastic, meaning I can easily see where
everything in the fridge is.

The plastic racks all pop in and out easily. It had two moveable shelves in
the main refrigerator compartment, one with a slide-out drawer; I couldn't
figure out a particularly efficient scheme for arranging the shelves until I
decided to just take the drawer, which didn't slide well anyway, and put it
in a closet. Now the space utilization works out better. One of the
features that I appreciated right away was that the doors could not be left
open, simply swinging shut when I let go of them. That seems like a "duh"
idea for an energy-efficient refrigerator; no doubt it's been around for
years, but I was pleased with it anyway.

There's the concern of whether the new refrigerator will last anywhere near
as long as the old, and I wondered if I was making a mistake in buying a
Whirlpool instead of a Maytag, having proof of Maytag durability. I did a
comparison check online and found out that Maytag was actually a Whirlpool
brand nowdays, Maytag having been bought out by Whirlpool in 2006. That
didn't tell me if the Whirlpool was reliable, but at least I didn't need to
worry that I would have got a better deal from Maytag.

* BUSINESS DOES RECYCLING: As reported by an article from THE NEW YORK
TIMES ("Companies Pick Up Used Packaging, and Recycling's Cost" by Stephanie
Strom, 23 March 2012), a growing number of big American food and beverage
companies in the United States are taking on the costs of recycling their
packaging after consumers are finished with it -- an obligation long imposed
on packaged goods companies in Europe and more recently in parts of Asia,
Latin America and Canada.

Jim Hanna, director of environmental impact at Starbucks Corporation, says
"extended producer responsibility (XPR)" is being driven by several factors:
"Local governments are literally going broke and so are looking for ways to
shift the costs of recycling off onto someone, and companies that make the
packaging are logical candidates. More environmentally conscious consumers
are demanding that companies share their values, too."

Hanna adds that "companies are becoming more aware that resources are limited
and what they've traditionally thrown away -- wow, it has value." Refining
aluminum is an energy-intensive process, and with high energy costs it's
cheaper to recycle. The same is becoming true for plastic bottles.

So far, company-sponsored recycling efforts are voluntary in the United
States. Many US states have laws requiring companies to take responsibility
for spent products such as batteries and mercury switches. Maine passed a
law in 2010 that allowed the state to place products, including packaging, to
the list of those for which manufacturers must assume the costs of disposal,
but the list hasn't been extended since then. To no surprise, there's a lot
of producer resistance to XPR, even from companies that are already doing it
elsewhere -- but a few major food and beverage companies like the idea.

Coca-Cola has set up a subsidiary, Coca-Cola Recycling LLC, to reach the
company goal of ensuring the recycling of 100% of its cans and bottles in
North America by 2015 and 50 percent in the rest of the world. Seven
factories owned wholly or in part by Coke around the world are focused on
plastic recycling. Coca-Cola is also tinkering with non-petroleum-based
plastics, with the company now selling fizzy drinks in bottles made of
polyethylene terepthelate (PET) produced with 70% oil and 30% plant
feedstocks; the H.J. Heinz company has licensed Coke's PET for ketchup
bottles. Coke also sets up bins at events such as NASCAR races for
recycling.

Similarly, Starbucks now has bins in which customers can toss their cups at
18% of its outlets in the USA and Canada, up from 5% just a year ago.
Starbucks has a goal of 100% by 2015. Starbucks cups are hauled off to a
recycling center in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where the cups are mixed with other
recycled material and turned into napkins for Starbucks outlets. Starbucks
is still much the exception in recycling paper cups, other organizations
finding it difficult to collect and process them.

However, New Hampshire yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm is successfully recycling
its containers. Yogurt is typically sold in cups made of polypropylene,
which municipalities typically won't recycle. In 2008, Stonyfield Farm began
to set up collection bins in Whole Foods stores, where customers can deposit
any polypropylene container -- margarine tubs, other brands' yogurt
containers -- with the materials obtained by a recycling firm named Preserve
and turned into toothbrushes and razors. A mickey-mouse program? In 2012,
some 11 million six-ounce yogurt cups were collected through the program, up
from 2.3 million in 2009.

Again, these firms are more the exception than the rule. Advocates of
XPR believe that it would get a big boost if retail giant Walmart embraced
it, but so far the company has said it's not in favor of the idea. Bill
Sheehan, executive director of the Product Policy Institute, a nonprofit that
promotes XPR, commented: "Walmart is doing some pretty good things
environmentally all on their own, and because of their size, they're able to
have a broad effect on what suppliers do." Whether Walmart lends its clout
to XPR remains to be seen.

* INTERNET OF STREETLIGHTS: There's been talk over the past decade
or so of the emerging "internet of things", with a wide range of mundane
devices digitally connected together. An article from BUSINESS WEEK
("A Brighter Future For Streetlamps" by Mary Jane Creuder, 14 May 2012),
discussed how that concept is being applied to streetlights.

The city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, long relied on sodium-vapor lamps for its
streetlight system. Sodium lamps are relatively power-hungry, and it was not
much of a leap for the city authorities to decide to convert to LED lamps
instead. LED arrays are expensive for the moment, but given their low power
consumption and long lifetimes, even at present they are a bargain for
streetlight systems over the long term.

Energy efficiency wasn't all there was to the story, however. At any one
time about 5% of Chattanooga's sodium streetlamps were dead, and the only way
to figure out which ones was for work crews to drive around at night and look
for them. In addition, some lamps would go on during the day, wasting power,
with that problem being harder to spot. Just going to LED lighting didn't
address those issues, but a local company named Global Green Lighting (GGL)
had a modest proposal: add wireless communications to each streetlight so it
could be controlled and report back on its status. After a successful pilot
test with 350 lamps in 2011, Chattanooga authorities awarded GGL a contract
to begin replacing the city's 26,500 sodium streetlamps with wireless-enabled
LED lighting. Savings in power and maintenance will allow the update to pay
for itself in seven years. GGL is not only providing the lighting system,
but also is under contract to maintain it, at a cost a quarter that of what
was previously paid.

In the network, each lamppost is designated by its GPS coordinates, with a
central controller able to selectively turn lights off or on, dim them or
brighten them, at will. Each node sends in status, telling the central
controller if the lamp is out or if there's some other fault; of course, the
central controller will also know if a node is dead and not responding. The
nodes even report their energy usage, in effect metering themselves for the
power utility. The cops can control the network, turning up the brightness
in an area to help track down a suspect, or dim them to help provide cover
for a police SWAT team.

GGL has been a pioneer in the development of "smart" streetlamp networks.
The company is working on a strobing system that could provide public alarms
for tornadoes and other emergencies, or guide ambulances and fire trucks to
an accident by "following the blinking lights". The firm has been working
with partner company Sensus, which provides the wireless tech, on
demonstrations in Baltimore, Ottawa, and at several universities.

* SMART PUMP: In a related exercise, BBC WORLD Online reported on a
scheme developed by researchers at Oxford University in which hand-driven
water pumps in African villages will report their operational status over
wireless. The villagers are very dependent on the pumps, but the pumps are
prone to breakdowns, with as many as a third of them out of business at any
one time. It can take weeks for the breakdown to be reported and have a
fixer dispatched to repair the problem.

The module is derived from cellphone tech, sending out text messages over the
cellphone network like an ordinary cellphone. It's fitted into the pump
handle and tracks how often the pump handle is moved up and down; if the
handle stops moving for a long period, that means the pump's broken. Usually
the fixes are trivial, involving replacement of seals or the like, and given
rapid notification of the problem a fix can be implemented quickly. The
system will track water usage, and the Oxford researchers believe that they
should also be able to eventually come up with "signatures" of pump behavior
that will predict specific failures in advance.

A trial is now being set up in 70 villages in Kenya. Initially, the modules
will be battery-powered, but there's some thought of optimizing them for
low-power operation and obtaining power from pump handle motion. There are
concerns about theft and vandalism -- but if their value is proven to
villagers, the villagers will make sure the modules are left alone.

* RETHINK THE SYSTEM (2): Having basically decided what I needed to do to
rebuild my website, there was the little issue of implementing it. The
challenge was that all I had was a general idea of what I needed to do; it
wasn't something I'd done specifically before, so I couldn't really come up
with a detailed plan, I just had to grab onto pieces and get them done.

The first thing to do was to separate the old website into the two new
websites, Vectors and AirVectors. That was more tedious than difficult,
mostly a question of rearranging the furniture -- modifying existing index
pages and writing up new ones, changing directory structures and names, and
appropriately modifying the batch files used to format the websites. As long
as I was at it, of course, I added some improvements, for example referencing
my Twitter account in the author string on each index page. I also
consolidated all the various support files for the websites into their own
directory, with the batch files tweaking them appropriately for use by the
two websites.

One of the tricky items I had to consider was the linkage between the two new
websites; I wanted to make sure readers of one were aware of and could easily
access the other. I'd been running my own banner ad on the bottom of each
page to promote a particular document each month, and if the number of hits
on the banner ad was any indication, it worked pretty well -- so I altered
the banner ad to have four buttons on the bottom, for:

VECTORS | AIRVECTORS | COMMENT | DONATE

-- and wrote up clickable bitmap code to map the map banner and the four
buttons to their proper targets. The COMMENT button was for the guest
comment board; it was not targeted at the board, it was instead targeted
at a "redirection" file, which contained HTML code to automatically transfer
a user to the board. That way, if I changed the message board tech -- I have
a bad habit of doing so, I just changed it once more, though I have hopes I
shouldn't feel the need to do it again any time soon -- all I would have to
do it change the target in one redirection file, not the HTML code on every
web page. I've become very fond of redirection files; they not only allow
easy changes of link targets, they are also tracked by site statistics,
showing how many times people have clicked through them.

I made the DONATE button in a bigger font and with gold color. I had
originally used red, but it didn't stand out enough; yellow didn't look quite
right, so I googled up images of gold and used that color instead. I also
hunted down an old icon of a couple of cherries I put together in my early
days of online to highlight the button. I'm not expecting a lot of
donations, and in fact I soft-pedaled my pitch, but if I get a few a month
it'll help a lot. I'm interested in observing the ratios of website page
views to donate page views to actual donations. Right now my suspicion is
that it's a thousand website page views to one donate page view, and a
hundred donate page views to one donation.

Another thing I wanted to do to unify the websites was use the same monthly
"Updates" file on both of them. However, that meant using full URLs for link
targets, and putting them in the source file was certain to be inconvenient.
I racked my brains for an answer, and finally the simple solution came to me:
precede a file link with either "VC/" or "AV/" to designate Vectors or
AirVectors appropriately, and then write a batch script to convert those tags
to their full pathnames as part of normal HTML formatting.

I managed to get the AirVectors site working well enough to stand on its own,
so then I got a hosting account from FatCow. I was a little bit leery of
low-cost hosting providers since they can be dodgy, but I didn't see a lot of
complaints about Fatcow online; I must say I found it easy to get a hosting
service from them, and when I had questions I got quick and good answers off
of live chat. That's reassuring, if not completely so, but no problems at
all so far. [TO BE CONTINUED]

* AIRLINER FACELIFT (3): Airliner inflight entertainment (IFE) systems
have been discussed
here
in the past, last in 2011. As reported by a fourth article from the AVIATION
WEEK set on airliner tech ("Sitting Pretty" by Kristin Majcher), inflight
entertainment systems are now expanding their domain to incorporate tablet
PCs and wireless connectivity.

Airvod of Dublin, Ireland, has been offering a "Seatcentric" IFE system based
on the "Crystal" line of touchscreen tablet PCs for the past five years or
so. Up to now, the tablets have been stored on a trolley and handed out to
passengers by flight attendants. That's a somewhat clumsy arrangement, and
so now Airvod is now partnering with aircraft maintenance and interiors
specialist Avianor of Montreal, Canada, to offer a Seatcentric scheme more
along the lines of traditional IFE systems, with tablets installed on the
back of each seat.

From the passenger point of view, the new Seatcentric system looks pretty
much like any other modern digital IFE system, but it's not as dependent on a
central server and doesn't require special wiring to support the tablets;
they communicate by high-speed wi-fi -- at 5.8 GHz instead of the more
conventional 2.4 GHz -- and only require a power connection from the seat.
The tablets have a 128 gigabyte flash card and can store dozens of movies, as
well as any other useful digital media. There's still a central server, but
it's relatively small and its normal function is to provide various alert
messages to the passengers via the tablets. The primary advantages of the
Seatcentric system are relative independence of the "nodes" from the server,
as well as reduced weight -- from elimination of wiring, which also
simplifies servicing -- along with ease of upgrade.

Thompson Aerospace of Irvine, California, is taking a slightly different
approach to IFE with its "1Net" system. The passenger nodes do not
communicate over wireless, instead using an Ethernet local network connection
-- but the 1Net physical connection also provides power, meaning only one
physical connection to a node, with an intermediate module supplying power
and network interface to six nodes. Again, the scheme reduces weight. The
nodes are not touchscreens, with a passenger making selections with a set of
buttons, and accessing data provided by a server as with a traditional IFE
system. The nodes provide a USB power plug to allow passengers to use their
own devices. The 1Net has an advertising orientation, with passengers
presented with ads targeted towards the aircraft's destination. The airline
operator then acquires revenue through conventional internet advertising
models, obtaining money from click-throughs and more money when a passenger
makes a purchase or reservation.

Technology giant Thales of France is now working on the use of gesture input
technologies for IFE systems, with a node featuring an infrared camera to
monitor and respond to passenger hand motions. Gesture input would seem to
offer convenience for passengers, but the payoff as Thales sees it is that
a camera with gesture recognition is cheaper than a touchscreen, and the
touchscreen is also less reliable and sanitary. All Thales has right now is
a prototype in evaluation, with no schedule for introduction, but it seems
like such a good idea that it might not be too long before someone walking
down the aisle of a jetliner in flight will see the passengers cryptically
waving their hands in the air.

* A fifth article from the AVIATION WEEK set ("Next Generation Wi-Fi Soars"
by Fred George) examined the rise of airline wireless systems. Thousands of
airliners now provide high-bandwidth wireless services to passengers, using a
3G wireless network provided by GoGo INC of Chicago. GoGo operates 134 cell
stations in the continental US and Alaska, providing 3.1 megabit per second
(MBPS) download and 1.8 MBPS upload rates, with the stations operating in the
800 MHz band.

GoGo is planning to "go global" in 2013 by leveraging off the Inmarsat
"Global Xpress" satellite constellation, which will provide near-global
coverage with download speeds of up to 50 MBPS using three geostationary
comsats operating in the Ka ("K above") band -- the service reaching
everywhere except for near-polar regions above 75 degrees latitude.
Lower-bandwidth Ku ("K under") band services are already available, for
example the Panasonic Avionics "eXConnect" system, but Ka-band services are
likely to render them obsolete within a few years. Comsat operator Viasat of
Carlsbad, California, intends to compete with Inmarsat's Global Xpress,
expanding its space wireless network from servicing ground-based users to
airline passengers.

To no surprise, at present airlines do not offer wireless as a free service,
and the tolls can be expensive. That can be an irritant to passengers who
are used to obtaining free wi-fi access in, say, a McDonald's; however,
nobody expects much in the way of freebies from airlines, and the number of
people willing to pay for inflight wireless has been ramping up. Still,
pressures to cut prices are rising as well, as free wi-fi becomes more
prevalent on the ground, and competition with Ka-band satellite services --
which offer so much bandwidth as to make the cost for any one user very small
-- heats up. Wireless is taking over the world, and it is unlikely the
airlines are going to be able to milk it for very long. [TO BE CONTINUED]

* SCIENCE NOTES: The Toxoplasma gondii parasite has been discussed
here
in the past, last in 2010. It's a protozoan that targets felines, taking up
residence in an intermediate host, such as a rat, as part of its life cycle.
It doesn't do a rat that much harm in itself, forming cysts in the rat's
brain but limiting its own proliferation by manipulating the host immune
system against itself -- since if it kills the rat it won't get into its
final victim, a cat. However, T. gondii is known to secrete chemicals
that make the rat careless, more easily caught by a cat.

T. gondii is a common parasite of humans as well, in fact in some places
the majority of the population is infected. In humans it seems generally
harmless to adults, though it can be dangerous to infants in the womb since
they don't have a developed immune system, meaning the parasite will not be
able to control its own propagation. There have been hints that it may
contribute to schizophrenia in humans; now there are hints that it may have
another influence on humans, helping them resist Alzheimer's disease.

As reported by Babbage, THE ECONOMIST's rotating science and technology
blogger, researcher Bong-Kwang Jung of Seoul National University in South
Korea got to wondering if T. gondii might mitigate against Alzheimer's.
Existing data actually showed that there was a correlation between an
infection by T. gondii and Alzheimer's, but Jung judged that might be
an artifact, Alzheimer's being a disease of the old, who often keep cats, and
so are more prone to be infected than average. He reasoned that T.
gondii lived in equilibrium in the brain of an intermediate host for an
indefinite period by restraining an inflammation reaction, and such restraint
might also inhibit Alzheimer's.

Test with mice genetically modified to be susceptible to Alzheimer's showed
that those infected with T. gondii were much less prone to develop
Alzheimer's than the mice in an uninfected control group. That is just
another hint in itself and it's hard to make too much of it, but it does
suggest that maybe Alzheimer's could be headed off by deliberate infection
with T. gondii, using strains of the protozoan optimized for best effect.
Indeed, it opens the door to using variants of the protozoan for a range of
possible effects on the brain. However, such things are clearly not
something that's going to ever happen without considerable evaluation: what
COULD go wrong?

* A genetic survey of cattle has shown that all of the world's roughly 1.4
billion domesticated cattle are are descendants of a single herd of wild ox
from 10,500 years ago. A team of geneticists from the National Museum of
Natural History in France, the University of Mainz in Germany, and University
College London in the UK performed the analysis on genomes of modern cattle
and also remains of cattle found in various archaeological digs.

The wild progenitor was the auroch, which died out in the 17th century,
though breeders have been trying to come up with a reasonable facsimile. In
any case, the auroch was in prehistoric times a fairly common beast, so it is
a bit surprising that it appears it was only successfully domesticated once.
However, it's consistent with what else known. Jean-Denis Vigne, a
bio-archaeologist from the French National Center for Scientific Research
(CNRS) and author on the study, commented: "A small number of cattle
progenitors is consistent with the restricted area for which archaeologists
have evidence for early cattle domestication 10,500 years ago. This
restricted area could be explained by the fact that cattle breeding, contrary
to, for example, goat herding, would have been very difficult for mobile
societies, and that only some of them were actually sedentary at that time in
the Near East."

* In another story of genomic archaeology, it was believed that during the
last Ice Age all of Scandinavia was covered by glaciers that rooted out all
the forests; when the ice melted about 9,000 years ago, Scandinavian forests
were reconstructed from tree populations to the south. However, a genomic
analysis of Scandinavian trees by Danish researchers shows that not all the
original forests were completely uprooted.

The researchers examined the DNA of modern spruce and analyzed the
composition of pine and spruce DNA in sediments from lake-core samples.
According to Professor Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen: "Our
results demonstrate that not all the Scandinavian conifer trees have the same
recent ancestors, as we once believed. There were groups of spruce and pine
that survived the harsh climate in small ice-free pockets, or in 'refuges',
as we call them, for tens of thousands of years, and then were able to spread
once the ice retreated. Other spruce and pine trees have their origins in
the southern and eastern ice-free areas of Europe. Therefore, one can now
refer to 'original' and later naturally 'introduced' Scandinavian conifer
species."

* MEASLES RAIDS EUROPE: As reported by an article in AAAS SCIENCE
("Europe's Embarrassing Problem" by Kai Kupferschmidt, 27 April 2012), in the
spring of 2009 a young man returned to his home in northern Bulgaria after a
stint working in construction in Hamburg, Germany. He carried along with him
an infection of the measles virus, which triggered off an epidemic that
sickened 24,000 people and killed 24 of them. The measles strain, codenamed
"D4-Hamburg", then migrated back into Germany, as well as other Balkan
nations and Turkey, where it raised more hell.

The irony of the matter is that it never needed to happen: cheap and
effective vaccines against measles are widely available, and in fact the
disease has been effectively wiped out in the New World. Europe, in
contrast, seems to be backsliding, cases having quadrupled since 2009; in
2011, France alone had more than 15,000. Importations of the disease from
Europe have led to an uptick in measles cases in the USA, though the
outbreaks have been limited, with widespread immunization preventing the
disease from propagating. The European Center for Disease Prevention &
Control (ECDC) in Stockholm, Sweden, has set a priority to get measles
under control, with a number of European nations setting up more aggressive
immunization programs.

One of the difficulties with measles control is that measles is generally
regarded as a harmless childhood disease. That is underestimating measles,
which killed about two million children a year before effective vaccines
became available in 1963. The disease usually doesn't kill by itself; it
simply weakens the immune system of it victims,leaving them vulnerable to
secondary infections by other pathogens. As a result, measles has its
highest mortality in India and sub-Saharan Africa, where public health
standards are low and many diseases are out of control. However, measles is
still dangerous enough in itself, with about one in 3,000 of those infected
being killed by it.

The measles vaccine is easy to administer: two doses are required, the first
given between 11 and 14 months of age, and the second given between 15 and 23
months of age. That protects more than 98% of vaccinated children at a cost
of less than a dollar per child. The measles vaccine is usually administered
as part of the combination "measles, mumps, rubella (MMR)" vaccine.

Since measles has no known animal hosts, it could in principle be eradicated
by a global immunization program. A decade ago, inspired by the suppression
of measles in the New World, the World Health Organization's European Region
set a target of 2010 for eradication of the disease there. When the disease
began its resurgence in 2009 the target date was slipped back to 2015, but
there are plenty of doubts that target will be met, either. Health
authorities are very worried that the European Football Championship this
June -- being held in Poland and the Ukraine, the cup's hosts -- will lead to
huge numbers of infections, the Ukraine already having had over 7,000 cases
earlier in the year. The upcoming London Olympic Games represent another
threat. The ECDC has been pushing sports fans to get vaccinated.

Why is Europe having such trouble with measles? To keep the disease under
control, 95% of a population needs to be vaccinated, that being enough to
prevent the disease from spreading if it breaks out in one locale. However,
European vaccination rates don't approach that level, for a number of
reasons. As mentioned, there's a widespread belief the disease isn't all
that much of a threat, and there's also worries about side effects -- greatly
inflamed by bogus claims that the MMR vaccine could cause childhood autism,
leading to significant drops in vaccination rates in the UK and Ireland.
There are also religious factions that are opposed to vaccination, and ethnic
groups such as the Roma -- gypsies -- that are hard to reach. However, as
one German health official puts it, one of the most common reasons is that
"parents simply forgot it or did not have the time."

All such conditions occur in the New World as well, but in most of the
nations of the Americas children must be vaccinated before they are allowed
entry into a school. Although Americans typically see Europe as
over-regulated, such a mandatory policy would be unacceptable in most
European countries. However, European health officials believe it would help
considerably if vaccination programs were at least brought into the schools.

That's the general consensus on what needs to be done to get measles back
under control: not just more publicity, but also more flexible vaccination
programs, and also enlisting the assistance of medical professionals to
encourage their patients to be vaccinated. Ironically, many European medical
professionals aren't vaccinated either -- an unacceptable situation, not
merely because medical staff are generally at a higher risk of infection than
the regular population, but because they may come into contact with patients
afflicted by weakened or compromised immune systems, who are extremely
vulnerable.

Vaccines are one of the honest miracles of medicines: they are cheap,
effective, and can generally keep up with the emergence of resistant strains
of pathogens. Unfortunately, the public in the developed world, enjoying a
largely disease-free society, tends to take vaccines for granted, dismissing
them as no longer important, or in the extreme even dangerously risky.
Seth Berkley, director of the GAVI Alliance -- a public-private organization
that promotes global immunization campaigns -- warned against such complacency:
"I have been in a refugee camp and watched measles come through, and every
day I saw the little graves of the all the babies who were buried. You don't
forget that."

* GLOBAL ZERO REVISITED: The concept of "Global Zero", or the
elimination of all nuclear weapons on Earth, was discussed
here
in 2011. As reported by THE ECONOMIST's strategy blogger, Clausewitz, the
Global Zero group has just released a new report, suggesting options for
near-term nuclear reductions between the US and Russia.

To review what was said earlier, while nuclear-armed nations have strong
motives to keep the Bomb, their motives for giving it up are getting
stronger all the time:

As more nations acquire nuclear weapons, the likelihood of them being
used increases.

The presence of large arsenals of nuclear weapons means risk of an
accident, or theft by terrorist groups.

Nuclear forces are extremely expensive to maintain -- and tactically
useless, since field commanders are not authorized to use nuclear weapons,
and practical war plans never incorporate their use.

The critical path in Global Zero is the mutual reduction of American and
Russian nuclear arsenals. These two nations have the biggest stockpiles, and
as long as they have nuclear weapons they will find it hard to persuade
nations that don't have the Bomb from trying to acquire it, or convince the
handful of other states that do to get rid of it. However, getting an
agreement between the two nations on the issue is not an easy job.

US President Barack Obama would certainly like to zero out America's nuclear
arsenal, being keen on following up the ratification of the "New START"
arms-reduction treaty last year to discuss further deep cuts in weapons with
the Russians. Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, seems very
enthusiastic about nukes and not at all enthusiastic about giving them up.
Putin has also demonstrated considerable antagonism towards US plans to set
up missile interceptor sites in Eastern Europe. The interceptor system is
only intended to protect Europe from a "pot shot" by Iran and couldn't
possibly handle an all-out Russian attack, but Russian officials have dropped
hints that their forces might take out any interceptor site that was set up
in Eastern Europe. The credibility of such a vague threat is too low to
allow it to be taken seriously, except as an indicator of Russian irritation.

For the moment then, Global Zero is not going anywhere in a hurry, but the
Global Zero group has gone ahead and proposed an American force structure as
a bargaining target in talks between the US and Russia. The scenario
envisions the US force cut to 900 warheads, with only half deployed; that's a
big cut from the New START limit of 1,550 warheads, to be attained in six
years, but 900 warheads would still be well more than enough to protect
America. America's reserve stockpile of almost 3,000 warheads, about 800 of
them "tactical" weapons, serves no useful purpose,

The new Global Zero proposal not only suggests eliminating tactical nukes,
but also all fixed-site, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles
(ICBMs), such as America's Minuteman system. The rationales behind giving
tactical nukes and ICBMs the axe are similar. In a crisis, tactical nukes
would be close to the battle lines, giving commanders the unpleasant choice
of "use them or lose them". They're not all that useful on a battlefield
either, since front-line commanders now have devastatingly-effective
precision-guided weapons that can do the job, and the generals know they can
actually use such weapons if they need to. The only reason for the US to
hang onto tactical nukes is because the Russians want to hang onto theirs, as
a means of offsetting their weakness in conventional forces; some NATO
members also see the basing of American nukes in Europe as establishing a
security guarantee. Fixed-site ICBMs are similarly subject to the rule of
"use them or lose them", and they have no military utility as well -- one
couldn't be launched at a target other than Russia without the Russians
worrying that they were the intended victim.

The flexible and survivable force envisioned by the Global Zero report would
consist of ten US Navy Trident ballistic missile submarines armed with 720
strategic missile warheads (360 deployed, 360 in reserve) and eighteen B-2
aircraft armed with 180 gravity bombs (90 deployed, 90 in reserve). The
Global Zero report suggests that even this scaled-down force would "project a
threat of draconian dimensions at any prospective aggressor country."

Obama appears receptive to the message, having recently ordered the Pentagon
to draw up nuclear force options for the future, ranging from an arsenal that
stayed at New START levels to one with 300 to 400 warheads. Of course Obama
won't do anything if he's not re-elected, and his Republican challenger
Mitt Romney has shown no liking for the idea of big nuclear weapons cuts.
Even if Obama wins, he'll still have to deal with Republican opposition to
cuts in the nuclear force, and those with a vested interest in the current US
strategic "triad" of land, air, and sea-based weapons -- such as congressmen
with constituencies dependent on Minuteman missile bases -- are likely to be
obstructionist as well. The biggest obstacle, however, will be the grumpy
Vladimir Putin, who has never demonstrated much interest in major arms cuts.
If Obama gets his second term, he'll have his work cut out for him.

* RETHINK THE SYSTEM (1): Every now and then I go through an abrupt
change on my website. It happened with a vengeance in mid-May when I checked
my Google Adsense stats one morning to see how much ad revenue the website
brought in -- to find an announcement that my Adsense account had been
terminated for violations of the rules.

Since I had the right to drop out of the program without explanation at any
time, obviously Google had the same right, and I couldn't complain. This is
not the same as saying Google was at all adroit in the way they handled it --
for starters, the message specifically declared that I wasn't going to be
told what the violations were. I was certainly not in any good humor over
it, but I will say no more. [ED: I would later take a more relaxed position
on the matter -- following the realization that internet advertising is a bad
business all around, and not much good can come of it.]

Anyway, I was paying for a server and the Adsense revenue had been covering
it with a bit of pocket money to spare, but now I had to pay out of my own
pocket. That set off a cascade of thinking matters over. There was no
problem in being able to afford a website, it was nothing much to support,
but it led to the question of why I should bother.

I made the spring edition of my trip to Spokane the next day, giving me time
to think things over, and the dark clouds cleared up. On consideration, I
knew that could think of nothing better to do than write for the web, and it
wasn't the sort of thing to ask for a second opinion on. However, I'd also
been discouraged by the fact that the number of visitors to my site has been
constant for the last few years. I'd been thinking I could get up to a
million readers a month -- that being the maximum value, I couldn't think of
getting more than that, but I figured I should be able to get a quarter or
maybe a half a million. The reality is that I'm hovering at about 110,000 a
month.

On considering that, however, I wasn't discouraged. Given 100,000 visitors a
month, it appears from various stat sites -- I can find a dozen of them with
stats on my website floating around in cyberspace -- that up to about 60% are
"bounces", they hit once and disappear, leaving about 40,000. On the simple
assumption that the odds of them having any interest in the site are 50:50,
that leaves 20,000 who are honestly interested. Similarly assuming that the
odds they like what they see are 50:50, that leaves 10,000 people a month who
have use for the site, with I would guess a few hundred to a thousand regular
visitors among them.

That's a problem? No. That's more than 12 interested visitors an hour, more
than 300 a day, which means that in effect I'm delivering a lecture to more
than 300 people a day -- every day. 30 regular readers a day? What's to be
disappointed about? People like to talk of the "global village", and that's
what I've got, a small community out of the vast internet to which I am
providing a service. Yes, more would be nice; if I went up to a million
visitors a month, still a small slice of the internet community, I would be
lecturing to more than 3,000 people a day. However, I would have no more
satisfaction in that than with 300. Writing's all about recognition, but
would being famous really buy me much? Staying unnoticed would be less
bother.

That still left me with the issue of operating at a loss. Again, I could
afford a website and it's not like I've ever made anything but pocket money
at it -- but the problem is that puts me in the effective position of paying
people to read my site. If so, the conclusion is that I might as well just
write for myself and not bother putting the stuff up on the web. Well, at
the very least I could reduce my losses, and at best I could start bringing
in a profit again.

Since my readership has plateaued, I have no real expectation of more traffic
any time soon, and it no longer made sense to pay for my own server.
However, on thinking it over I decided I could cut my expenditures to a
quarter of what they were by breaking up the site into components:

Get a Pro account on Flickr and move all my photos over there. I have the
suspicion that it was imagery downloads, I bet mostly by robots, that led
to the bandwidth crunch that forced the move to my own server. The images
are bandwidth hogs well out of proportion to their visibility to readers.
Besides, I think my photos will get better exposure on Flickr.

Split the remaining website into halves, one for AirVectors and the other
for all the rest of Vectors, obtaining separate hosting accounts for each.
If either site got loaded down, I could split it again and put it on a
third host.

The uploads to Flickr were going to take some time to complete given that I
had over 3,000 photos to upload and properly index. However, as far as the
rest went, I wanted to be operational by the end of May. [TO BE CONTINUED]

* As mentioned
here
last year, relations between Turkey and Israel have been tense as of late.
As a case in point, BBC WORLD Online reports that the citizens of a village
in southeast Turkey went into a small-scale panic when they discovered a
dead European bee-eater in a field. The colorful birds migrate through the
region, so finding one was not a surprise; what got people excited was that
it had a ring on its leg marked "Israel".

On inspecting the sad dead bird, they became concerned that it might have
been implanted with spy microchips. Experts at the government agricultural
ministry examined the bird and judged it not guilty, but one of the officials
at the ministry said the local police were not easily reassured. Of course,
putting rings on the legs of migratory birds is hardly mysterious, the rings
being used to track the birds' movements. The BBC's correspondent in Turkey
told the home office that Turks are quick to grab onto absurd conspiracy
theories, with the Israelis often targeted as the culprits. Humans seem to
have a certain wired-in inclination to crazy ideas; as Douglas Adams put it
in his HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, this sort of thing is going on all
the time, and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it.

* Although I was under the gun last month -- more on this come Monday -- I
ended up being sidetracked when I decided to look around for some way of
putting together cartoons. I did an update of my obscure document EVOLUTION,
ENTROPY, & INFORMATION and I was trying to find some way, any way, to liven
it up a bit, and I thought adding some cartoons would help.

What I found was a website named "FaceYourManga", which had a tidy little
system for synthesizing manga-oriented cartoon avatars for online forums and
the like. I found it easy to come up with a reasonable facsimile of myself,
and was quickly churning out avatars at will. Given the avatars, it was
straightforward to come up with a cartoon scheme based on Twitter "tweets",
and so now I have my own comic series -- which I call "TWITZ".

I half considered putting together TWITZ on a regular basis, but decided it
didn't really have that much potential. However, there are times when the
cartoon option is clearly handy, and so readers are going to be seeing more
TWITZ in the future -- at least until they tell me to knock it off.

Incidentally, EVOLUTION, ENTROPY, & INFORMATION has been something of a dud,
having attracted little attention since its release about two years ago. On
consideration, I decided I was good with that. I wrote that document because
for some reason creationists decided to grab onto information theory as part
of their bag of tricks, and I wanted to show how bogus the game was. Now I
don't see the exercise as all that necessary, since the lack of public
interest in my document is clearly due to lack of public interest in the
subject. "Creationist information theory" is obviously not a hot topic. I
did have some fun writing that document, and maybe there will be some
interest in it one of these days. However, I'm not planning to hold my
breath and wait for that to happen.